Foldable Human
Dreams in a Questionable Time :: One
I tend to not use Flickr for my composite photos. Never really sure why. It's certainly not something I'm in any moral sense opposed to, and it's actually something I enjoy working on, but I find that I'll frequently spend hours pouring work into building something only to throw it out without saving because it just doesn't work for me. This is all part of why I lean so heavily on chemical photography: it forces me as a photographer, as a graphic artist, to accept the results of my work as what they are. If I think back to when I first started digital graphics back in the late 90's, my early home forays into the field had no checks or balances placed against them to screen out whether or not something was even a good idea in the first place.
I find digital art can be very distracting, you have so many tools at your disposal that the temptation to "fix" bad photos is too great. There are the times when a technically horrid photo needs to be salvaged for whatever purposes, or standard editorial interpretation (contrast, colour balance, cropping) can breathe life into a so-so picture, but without the hard reality of shooting film (particularly shooting chrome) one can spend vast amounts of time producing bad art and never develop an eye for self-critique.
If you take away self critique, give powerful toys to the masses, and give the masses a self-contratulatory audience of themselves, aesthetic often dies a slow, painful death. Granted it's this sesspool of mediocre product that fuels the dissatisfaction that inevitably drives the next generation of great artists to revolt.
As for this piece, it needs a cropping, the lines aren't as seamless as I could make them, and the whole thing with the palm trees is a horrific cliche. That said, I felt it was worth talking about.
Dreams in a Questionable Time :: One
I tend to not use Flickr for my composite photos. Never really sure why. It's certainly not something I'm in any moral sense opposed to, and it's actually something I enjoy working on, but I find that I'll frequently spend hours pouring work into building something only to throw it out without saving because it just doesn't work for me. This is all part of why I lean so heavily on chemical photography: it forces me as a photographer, as a graphic artist, to accept the results of my work as what they are. If I think back to when I first started digital graphics back in the late 90's, my early home forays into the field had no checks or balances placed against them to screen out whether or not something was even a good idea in the first place.
I find digital art can be very distracting, you have so many tools at your disposal that the temptation to "fix" bad photos is too great. There are the times when a technically horrid photo needs to be salvaged for whatever purposes, or standard editorial interpretation (contrast, colour balance, cropping) can breathe life into a so-so picture, but without the hard reality of shooting film (particularly shooting chrome) one can spend vast amounts of time producing bad art and never develop an eye for self-critique.
If you take away self critique, give powerful toys to the masses, and give the masses a self-contratulatory audience of themselves, aesthetic often dies a slow, painful death. Granted it's this sesspool of mediocre product that fuels the dissatisfaction that inevitably drives the next generation of great artists to revolt.
As for this piece, it needs a cropping, the lines aren't as seamless as I could make them, and the whole thing with the palm trees is a horrific cliche. That said, I felt it was worth talking about.